


Recycled Souls

by kasandra



Category: Beetlejuice - All Media Types, Heathers (1988), Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: All of the variations are true, Dubious Morality, F/M, J.D. is very dead, Veronica Sawyer is Lydia Deetz, dead dead deadsky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 17:11:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17666690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kasandra/pseuds/kasandra
Summary: Veronica Sawyer has graduated highschool in one piece, with a shambles of a mental state and a diploma. Sometimes you have to go to the beginning to find out where you can go from here, though.She's just hoping not to leave a trail of bodies in her wake...





	Recycled Souls

High School was… finished, for better or worse and she wasn't quite sure what to feel about it, in her cap and gown and taking pictures with both sets of parents and step parents. Mom and Dad were being cordial for once, and wasn't that a blessing?

She should be happy. She shouldn't feel as if she’d hollowed her chest out with a spoon like so many tubs of chocolate chunk ice cream.

Veronica Lydia Deetz-Sawyer. Twelve years after the divorce and she certainly hoped this was the last time she would change her name. She'd stopped taking sides.

They finally were tuckered out after the reception, had Vietnamese and settled down looking at pictures. She had loved that once upon a time, the art of documenting through a lens. How did that strong willed, passionate little girl become washed out, she wondered. How much better off would she have been if she had just stayed with Dad and Delia for highschool too?

Or would it all still be the same?

“Have you made a decision yet, Pumpkin?”

Peeking up from the glass of scotch she was curled up with, Veronica blinked at her father, “mm?”

“Did you want to come back to Connecticut with Delia and me? I know you said you wanted to wait a year to start college-” he ignored mom's disapproving sound in her throat from the sofa “-we could get more chemicals for your dark room and … _create_.” Charles Deetz glanced at his wife, hoping that he wouldn't activate her with the phrase.

“... Give me a bit of time Dad, I've got some… things to take care of, but that sounds good,” drinking always made her sluggish and maudlin, like it was reminding her of things long past that she shoved away.

A motorbike to register in her name. A 7-11 to burn to the ground in effigy. Just errands.

“Mm who's this, dad?” She hummed, tapping on a picture of herself in that garish red spiderweb poncho and the ugliest girl she'd ever seen. There it was again, Heather Chandler in the back of her mind. She could practically see her now, leaning over her father, nose wrinkled, blue like the industrial cleaner and bloodied.

“Fuck a Duck, Veronica, I knew you were hopeless before we found you but _really_ , that's what you looked like?”

She waved her hand absentmindedly to get rid of the thought. Just ghosts of a guilty conscience. Something she needed to get used to.

“I'm surprised you don't remember her, darling, you and Betty Juice were thick as thieves.” She certainly looked happy, despite the dark demeanor. Selling out wasn't exactly her proudest moment, or apparently her most self aware one. 

Blending in required her to be of a beige sort of existence. Something in her longed for those dark days- perhaps that was the only way she could be real.

\---

Necromancers and mediums were the bane of her existence, Juno couldn't help but think when she sighed out a plume of smoke through the slit of her throat.

Once more the file of one Lydia Deetz nearly broke her desk as it slammed down. Three different instances of complete alteration of memory and still, the Neitherworld had to keep an eye on her. She attracted trouble like a plague to rats.

Apparently it wasn't limited to the world of the dead either, she huffed, eyeing over the teenager in front of her, covered in ash and missing a middle finger. “Odd way for a kid to kill himself.”

“It's a bit of poetic irony, I suppose,” he chuckled. He was tired. Apparently the afterlife wasn't as he hoped. Join the club.

“Let's get you settled in, kid, you're here for the long haul. Suicides like yourself become Civil Servants, but… your case is a bit special.” He didn't look surprised. “What can you tell me of Veronica Sawyer?”

There was the reaction. His eyebrows twitched and furrowed, mouth drawing, “What do you want with Ronnie?”

“Information.”

He seemed to watch her, unsure and speculative, “...She's the good sort, you know? Two parents, a white picket fence, upper middle class lifestyle...and a conscience. Is she-”

“She's fine. Alive.”

His body sank in the duster he seemed to have melted in. “Good. Good…then why…”

“She's a special case,” she pat the giant stack in front of her. “.... You'll be reading up on this. Study it. And oh yes.. you'll need this.” the handbook plopped on top of it. “... Hop to it, kid. It's your afterlife.”

“..Veronica says hi, I think.”

“Yeah I'm sure she does.” She had put off a belligerent poltergeist for the better part of seven years for that kid. Miss Argentina could hold him off a little longer. This explosive prone kid would need all the time he could get before dealing with Beetlejuice.


End file.
